After the Beep, Exit the Premises

Share

After the Beep, Exit the Premises

If you see cops or firefighters with pagers on their belts, don't assume they're carrying relics of the days before cellular phones took over the world. Chances are good that the pagers can't pass along any message except this one: Radiation is nearby, and you may be in danger.

The pagers are designed to beep or vibrate in the presence of potentially dangerous radiation. Since 9/11, they've become a routine piece of equipment for thousands of Customs and Border Protection officers, along with an unknown number of cops, firefighters and other "first responders," including police who patrolled at least one Super Bowl.

If they work properly, the radiation pagers may reveal the silent and invisible presence of a "dirty" bomb. "If you've got a lethal dose of gamma rays, it tells you to back the heck out," said Sgt. Conrad Grayson, head of the San Diego County bomb squad.

The pagers aren't perfect, however. It's not entirely clear if they're effective against all kinds of dirty bombs, and they're prone to false alarms. They're also expensive. At $1,500 to $2,500 each, they carry a hefty price for gadgets geared to detect the uncertain – some would say unlikely – threat of a dirty-bomb attack.

Even so, the Customs Service has given the pagers to all of its officers, and federal officials reportedly deployed them at the 2002 Super Bowl in New Orleans. Last January, ABC News reported that the government sent 1,000 pagers to law enforcement agencies in cities hosting major New Year's Day events; cops patrolling the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl also got pagers. The distribution came in the wake of threats of a dirty-bomb attack by al-Qaida.

Local police and fire departments, meanwhile, continue to put the pagers on their wish lists. "I went through my budget and made sure that everybody had them," Grayson said. "If I'm going to have one, we're all going to have them. I want to make sure my guys are protected."

Before 9/11, bomb-squad investigators like Grayson were pretty much the only people who carried the pagers, which began appearing in the late 1990s. And prior to introduction of the pagers, which estimate the level of nearby radiation, "there wasn't any practical way to detect radiation without a Geiger counter, and nobody had those things," said Mark Miller, a terrorism consultant with Virginia-based Executive Protection Systems. "If they did, they were stuck in a civil-defense warehouse and hadn't been calibrated for years."

Then came the terrorist attacks. Law enforcement officials began worrying that routine fires or explosions could spell trouble. Meanwhile, "radiation-dispersal devices," long a bugaboo among terrorism experts, got a catchy new name: dirty bombs.

"I've been talking about (the risks) for years, and a number of other people have been talking about them, but it's only just been after 9/11 that people took notice or paid any attention," Miller said. "On the local level, no one even thought of it as a possibility."

A dirty bomb is an explosive device that disperses radioactive material when it goes off. "Mainly, what it's going to do is contaminate a large area," Miller said. "You're not going to have a huge amount of immediate casualties. Those casualties will come from the explosion that dispersed the radioactive material. Instead, it will contaminate a large area that's difficult to clean up."

Potentially, a contaminated area could be unfit to be inhabited for years or even decades, and people exposed to the initial burst of radiation could develop cancer. Ideally, the radiation pager would alert police or firefighters to contact terrorism experts and evacuate an area.

Experts disagree on the likelihood of an attack with a dirty bomb, known as a "weapon of mass disruption" in the terrorism-monitoring business.

"A dirty bomb is not something that keeps me awake at night," said Allen W. Batteau, director of the Institute for Information Technology and Culture at Wayne State University. "You have to have access to some radioactive materials. There are stray radioactive materials out there, especially used medical materials, but synthesizing a chemical weapon is a lot easier."

On the other hand, Joseph Cirincione, director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., is surprised that no terrorists have turned to dirty bombs.

"Terrorists are already expert at car bombs and truck bombs. Simply adding a radioactive ingredient, while not causing many casualties, would spread mass terror. I don't know why they haven't done this yet," he said. "The explosives are easy to get, and there are thousands of sources of radioactive material in this country. You can buy it or steal it all right here."

Despite the growing popularity of radiation pagers, no one is quite sure how well they work at detecting dirty bombs. The Department of Homeland Security has asked the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to test the devices.

Radiation-pager users do know one thing: The gizmos are sometimes too sensitive. Grayson, the bomb-squad investigator, was surprised one day when his pager began "kicking up loud" in his office. It turned out that the son of one of his officers had come into the building after going through radiation treatment. "It's gone off at hospitals and airports, and it's gone off at other areas I can't really discuss," Grayson said.

Other stories of unusual alarms abound. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that a radiation detector went off in Westchester County, New York, when 2 tons of garbage arrived from Ohio. The culprit: kitty litter used by a cat that was undergoing radiation treatment for a thyroid problem. (Radioactive kitty litter has caused problems elsewhere, too.)

If users don't set up their pagers to avoid false alarms, "these things might be turned off when the real problems come," said Michael A. Levi, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies terrorism. But while radiation pagers aren't perfect, their proliferation in the hands of law enforcement is more than just "window dressing," said Levi, who called the devices "useful."

However, he said, "we certainly shouldn't assume that because a detector doesn't go off there's no problem."